Daniel Traub (photographer)

Daniel Traub (* 1971 in Philadelphia ) is a multi-award-winning American photographer and filmmaker. His work mainly deals with marginalized social groups .

First years

Traub grew up in Philadelphia in a creative environment. His father David S. Traub is an architect, his mother Lily Yeh , who was born in China, was a professor of painting and art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and his uncle Charles H. Traub is a well-known American photographer.

Daniel Traub began touring the streets of Philadelphia with the camera at the age of twelve. He later studied photography with Joel Sternfeld at Sarah Lawrence College and film production and film history with Abigail Child and Gilberto Perez.

He received his Master of Fine Arts from the MFA Photo, Video and Related Media department of the School of Visual Arts in New York City , where he studied with Raghubir Singh, Max Kozloff and others.

Working as a photographer

Traub, who mainly lives in New York City, made a name for himself primarily with long-term photographic studies. From 1998 to 2007 he lived in China and worked on projects such as Simplified Characters , a series of street photographs depicting the tremendous changes in the cities of China at the beginning of the 21st century. The picture series Peripheries deals with the landscape of the outskirts of several Chinese cities.

In 2007 he moved back to the USA and started a project about his hometown Philadelphia. North Philadelphia is a photographic portrait of a neighborhood in ongoing crisis. It presents an insight into an urban area, between decay and awakening, symbolic of many such regions across the United States. Created between 2008 and 2013, North Philadelphia combines images of dilapidated houses, vacant lots, and street corners with portraits of local residents. Traub's North Philadelphia was the inspiration for the movie Night Comes On in Philadelphia.

From 2009 to 2014 Traub worked on the subject of Little North Road on further trips to China . The focus is on a pedestrian bridge in the southern Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou . The bridge serves as a symbolic gateway from Africa to China. At the heart of this project is a selection of images collected by two wandering Chinese portrait photographers, Wu Yong Fu and Zeig Xian Fang, who make a living creating souvenir portraits of Africans and other people who remember their time wanted in China. Daniel Traub's photographs on the bridge and in the immediate vicinity explore the dynamics of the area and provide the context for viewing these portraits.

Daniel Traub's photographs have been exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, and the Lianzhou Photo Festival in China . His work can be found in public as well as private collections, such as the Margulies Collection at WAREhOUSE and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art . His work has also appeared in publications such as Aperture, European Photography and the New York Times Magazine .

Publications

Traub has published two monographs with the Kehrer Verlag in Heidelberg : North Philadelphia (2014) and Little North Road - Africa in China (2015).

Chinese cape. Zeng Han, Ed. Shenzhen, China 2010. (Eng.)
North Philadelphia. Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-86828-478-2 (monograph). (German)
Little North Road - Afrika in China Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2015, ISBN 978-3-86828-629-8 (monograph). (German)

Traub's North Philadelphia inspired the location for the film Night Comes On .

Film productions

Lily Yeh, photographed by Daniel Traub

As a filmmaker , Traub has directed feature-length documentaries such as: B. Barefoot Artist , a report about his mother, the Chinese-born artist Lily Yeh, who lives in the USA, and her works of art in war-torn communities, or Xu Bing : Phoenix , who shows the living conditions of Chinese migrant workers. Traub directed the camera for documentaries for PBS, Arte and ZDF , among others in cooperation with foreign correspondent Joachim Holtz . In 2011 Daniel Traub founded his film production company "Itinerant Pictures". In 2019 he completed Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own , a documentary about the German-born American artist Ursula von Rydingsvard .

Exhibitions (selection)

solo

Belfast Exposed, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2007
FotoFest, Houston, TX, USA 2008
Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL, USA 2008
Print Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA 2010
Lianzhou Photo Festival, Lianzhou, China, 2011
Bluesky Gallery, Portland, OR, USA 2012
Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, PA, USA 2015

group

Asian American Arts Center, New York, NY 1995
Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, NY 1995
Visual Arts Gallery, New York, NY 1998
Taipei Artist Village, Taipei, Taiwan 2005
Lianzhou International Photo Festival, Lianzhou, China 2005
Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX 2007
Jen Bekman Gallery, New York, NY 2007
M97 Gallery, Shanghai, China 2007
Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA 2009
24me Festival International de Mode et de Photographie, Hyères, France 2009
Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA, USA 2009
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA 2009
Times Museum, Guangzhou, China 2010
RH Gallery, New York, NY 2012
CFEVA Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, USA 2012
Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, USA 2013
Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA, USA 2014
GallerySKE, New Delhi, India 2015
Chinese Culture Center, San Francisco, CA, USA 2016
SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA, USA 2016
James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA, USA 2016
Ivorypress, Madrid, Spain 2016/2017
SCoP Shanghai Center of Photography, China, 2017
Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt, Germany, 2019

Public collections

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , San Francisco
Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami
Portland Art Museum , Portland OR
Philadelphia Museum of Art , Philadelphia
Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia

Awards (selection)

FotoFestiwal, Lodz, Poland, Award, 2007
Photo District News 30, 2008
24th Festival International de Mode et de Photographie à Hyères, France, finalist, 2009
Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, PA, Fellowship, 2009
Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, Florida, residency, 2009
The Photo Review Competition, First Prize, 2009
Paris Photo-Aperture Photobook Prize, France, finalist, 2016